Frankly, I'm glad that the modern-era stardates make some sense. The old way was just silly. I know some posters here consider anything TOS inviolable, and anything from TNG onward worthy of scorn. In all honesty, that's even sillier than quibbling about stardates. (End of mini-rant).

I always assumed there had to have been a longer "in-universe" span of years for the characters, esp. Chekov, to have advanced in rank. It also made sense since about 14 years had passed since the end of TOS and the beginning of TWOK.

But is there any actual, so-called "canon" evidence that about 12 years had passed? (Yeah, I said, "canon," sue me!)

InklingStar said:
All that is really "canon" is that 15 years span Space Seed and TWoK.

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15 years from ``Space Seed'' to The Wrath of Khan; and we know that The Motion Picture is no less than two and a half years away from the end of the Five-Year Mission. If we assume that it's this minimum time, and further that ``Space Seed'' was in the middle of the Five-Year Mission (not explicitly stated, but it gives us a range), then that gives five years from ``Space Seed'' to The Motion Picture and thus ten years between that and The Wrath of Khan.

Which incidentally neatly suggests that if stardates in that era rolled over after reaching 9,999.99 and that one calendar year earth-style is about 1000 stardates then ... The Wrath of Khan had to be at least ten years after The Motion Picture. Given the wiggle room in just when ``Space Seed'' happened, this is all stunningly consistent for a system designed to be obscure on this point.

The thing is, most stardates do jibe with the Meyer/TNG system nicely enough. The glaring exception (besides TAS) is the progression of TOS movies, the biggest problem indeed being the TMP/TWoK comparison.

However, we know that the TNG system includes a "decade digit", and we further know that the Trek saga certainly spans decades even in the TOS era. If we assume that our heroes simply drop the decade digit from TOS era stardates (like we might say "back in seventy-five" rather than "back in nineteen-seventy-five"), we can assign different, consecutive decade digits to TMP and TWoK. Voilá, a dozen-year difference, just as required!

It's not perfect for ST6 any more. But it's damn near perfect for every other stardate ever uttered in the entirety of Star Trek (again, TAS notwithstanding). Nyah nyah, Roddenberry and your failed attempt at obfuscation!

^There's also the fact that "Q2" nailed down the end of the Five Year Mission as being 2270, which means TMP could have happened anywhere from the middle of 2272 to the middle of 2273.

Then there's also Kirk's bottle of Romulan Ale, which has a vintage of 2283. Unless the Romulans keep a calendar with its own separate count of years (like the Hebrew calendar), that means TWOK is closer to 2284 or 85.

On the Romulan ale reference, I always thought it implied a later dating than Okuda generally gave. Bones says it takes a while to ferment". Two years is nothing compared with your average bottle of whisky or a decent wine. I suppose Bones could be using his famous wit though.

You sound like Brannon Braga! But sadly, I'll have to accept this answer.

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No, he sounds like Gene Roddenberry. GR and his boss Herb Solow intentionally avoided putting any clear date references into TOS because they didn't want to get locked down. The whole point of the stardate system was its complete lack of meaningful information.

In Stephen E. Whitfield's "making of Star Trek" book (of which I have an exceedingly old copy - 74 I think!), Gene Roddenberry mentions the aforementioned desire to keep the stardates vague. He also felt the date would be different in different parts of the universe at the same time. It might be Stardate 1701.1 on Earth and 1234.5 on Vulcan or something like that. Kind of like the time difference between the different parts of the world we have now. Thats why the Star Dates jumped around in TOS.

I think jon1701's explanation is the best. That and the whole Gene didn't want anyone to know the year TOS took place although there were episodes that said 200, 400, and 700(or was it 800 for Squire of Gothis) years. It was always confusing. While TOS was going on Gene didn't know what year the show took place. It wasn't till after the show was canceled that 23rd century was finalized and it wasn't till TWOK when it said "somewhere in the 23rd century" or something like that.